My Environment: Landscape artist Kurt Jackson on painting British rivers

28 February 2025

The acclaimed landscape artist on his dynamic creative process, painting as politics, and bringing together four decades of rivers in his art

Kurt Jackson is an artist and environmentalist whose dynamic, often large-scale works engage with both the natural world and the political landscape that impacts upon it. He exhibits at galleries across the UK but his work can most reliably be found at the Jackson Foundation, the gallery he set up in 2015 with his wife Caroline in their adopted hometown of St. Just, Cornwall.

This past autumn saw the release of Kurt Jackson’s Rivers, a monograph that brings together reproductions of paintings, sculptures, prints, poetry and prose inspired by British waterways over the course of Jackson’s 40-year career.

“It has so much agency as a subject, especially at the moment with this reckoning of what we've done to our rivers,” says the artist. “Flowing water is very charismatic and joyful, without really seeing the actual ecological health of the water that passes you by. It's the same when you're painting the river. It's very difficult to show whether that water is healthy or not. It's easier to do it in written language, which is why I use poetry a lot as well.”

What was it that first drew you to working in nature?

Both my parents were part of the peace movement, which moved into the wider environmental movement through organisations like Friends of the Earth. Living alongside the River Ver in Hertfordshire as a child, my interest in watercourses grew with the green political agenda – finding plants and animals, identifying birds, as well as mucking around with rope swings and chatting with girls and all the rest of it.

In my teens, I started making tentative watercolours and drawings about what I was finding along that river valley. Then when I was studying zoology at Oxford University, I would escape that rarefied setting by going to the water meadows along the Thames to make paintings.

Tell us about your creative process

It varies, because I want to keep my creativity as dynamic as possible. I don't want to stagnate. But the majority of my work is completed outdoors. I need direct observation and immersion, partly because it's the information that goes into my work, but it's also about a sort of collaborative process between me and the environment. That sounds a bit grand, but it comes down to making discoveries through serendipity. Whether it's that rain comes on, I'm attacked by someone's dog, I fall in the river, or find a species I've never come across, all these things kick me out of any complacency and make more interesting work.

At the beginning of a painting, I never know what I'm going to do or how I'm going to do it. I have no idea – which is the excitement, and I need that excitement. The narrative of making the painting – what I've learned, what I've seen – is as important as the final piece.

Your new book looks back to when you first start painting, 40 years ago – how have you changed over that time?

Back then, I was discovering myself, and discovering how to how to make work. My response was quite simplistic in terms of how I actually made the work, and it was very paper-based, small-scale. I was very tentative with my mark making and my approach.

Nowadays, my practice is far wider. I'm more of a polymath. I'm more ambitious, both in terms of the individual marks, but in terms of the scale of the work and the range of media. I look at that work I did then, and I really enjoy some of it. I can see that I was searching. I hope I'm still searching; I hope I'm not settled into my laurels as I get older.

Do you seek to provoke a particular response in your audience?

I want people to see the whole natural world as something fragile, diverse, complicated. But beauty is incredibly important. There's too much contemporary art in recent decades that has ignored beauty and gone more for shock and awe. If you want to make the environment and what's happening to it accessible, artworks can be a really good tool to make people engage with science.

Making marks on my canvases along the river gives me a platform to bring this subject up in public. When I'm talking at the Royal Academy, people expect me to talk about making a painting on the bank of the river, and why I do that. I'm tell them that it's political, that’s it’s the front line of the catastrophe we're going through.

Why is it political for you?

As an artist who works with the natural world and largely in situ, en plein air, I can't ignore the environmental catastrophe. If I'm going to share the beauty, joy, complexity of the natural world, I have to discuss the fragility of it as well. There's a responsibility in every one of us, in our day-to day-living and what we leave behind. Some can do more and some can do less – it largely boils down to your position in the world.

Tell us about how that manifests at your gallery

Ever since my earliest exhibitions, whether they were in commercial galleries or public galleries, I've always insisted there has to be another element to the exhibition, whether it's about fundraising or raising awareness for a cause, opening people’s eyes to charitable groups. Most exhibitions are either about selling work or just about the works themselves and how they were done and that’s it. But I've always believed there's a wider agenda, so when eventually we built the Jackson Foundation, that had to be a part and parcel of it and it's worked fantastically in all sorts of ways.

Our upstairs charity space focuses on the Foundation’s collaborations with some of the charities we support, including Greenpeace, Surfers Against Sewage and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust.

We’ve also been able to include the local community of St Just rather than just plonking this thing there and ignoring them. Its post-industrial, agricultural, ex mining, and although there's always been artists associated with there, the arts infrastructure has never been very inclusive. It’s important to bring in schools, colleges, youth groups, amateur painting clubs, to bring them all on board and also to encourage people to get out in the countryside. We arrange for people from wildlife groups and scientists to lead walks, show them what's out there. It's all about opening people's eyes and seeing what's changing in the world and why.

Kurt Jackson’s latest exhibition, “Sea Flower”, opens at the Jackson Foundation on 21 March. Kurt Jackson’s Rivers is out now.

Author: Jo Caird, editor at The Environment